The commercial printing industry has developed and modernized with the primary goal of efficiently and accurately producing uniformly printed and high quality goods, often in large runs. Newspapers, for example, are printed daily in runs of thousands or millions in a matter of mere hours. Printing equipment, order handling, and general infrastructure, from placement to delivery, have therefore been designed to most effectively handle these types of orders.
By contrast, individualized printed goods including customized or personalized information and graphics are typically printed in smaller runs. Individualized printed goods can include paper products such as business cards, letterhead, invitations, calendars, and announcements, as well as a diverse range of other goods including apparel, bags, banners, signs, glassware, mugs, cups, bottles, pens, pencils, trophies, statuettes, sporting goods and equipment, magnets, tags, labels, mailers, packaging materials, digital and computer products, and other items that include personal, corporate, or other customized or personalized data, graphics, logos, colors, schemes, or information. As such, the term “printing” is broadly and generally used herein to refer to a variety of manufacturing, production, reproduction, and creation systems and methodologies.
Individualized printed goods are important personal and professional communication tools on which businesses and individuals rely to accurately and effectively provide information, project an image, advertise or market ideas and events, and encourage more personal communicative contact in increasingly impersonal and isolated digital environments. For example, despite the availability and convenience of digital transmission and communication technologies, hardcopy business cards remain relevant and effective business communication tools. Because individualized goods are more personal and can be targeted and customized for particular uses, relatively smaller runs are often produced to meet varying specific needs. A wedding invitation order might include two hundred announcements and reply cards. Business cards are often printed in orders comprising 250 to 1,000 or more individual cards. Hats or T-shirts can be printed for particular events, such as an annual 5K race or a family reunion. Magnets and plastic cups can be produced monthly, seasonally, or annually to include a particular team's schedule.
While the commercial printing industry can print quality individualized printed goods, the current infrastructure is not sufficiently nimble so as to quickly produce single short-run orders at a low cost. For example, set-up, design, and other fees often make it more cost effective on a per-item basis to order 1,000 customized T-shirts instead of only ten. In some instances, the printing system can make the production of smaller orders more efficient from a manufacturing and processing perspective by holding multiple single short-run orders to form a single larger run order. Multiple business card orders, for example, can be held until enough are received to fill out a single printing run, which is often preferred in some circumstances to reduce operational stresses on printing press systems.
The result, from the printer's perspective, is an efficient use of printing resources. From a consumer's perspective, however, the result can be an extended wait time for individualized printed products rather than a desired quick turnaround. In the above business card example, the consumer submitting the first order of a larger run of orders may experience a delay of several days to several weeks before their order is even printed, much less packaged, shipped, and delivered, given the practice of holding multiple individual orders for larger runs. In addition to being delayed, the wait period can also be uneven between different consumers, depending upon whether a consumer's order is one of the first or last received in a single large run.
Unfortunately, balancing the needs of commercial printers with those of individual consumers is not easily accomplished. While some printing companies may have equipment designed more exclusively for short-run jobs, this equipment is often more costly and less efficient than that used for larger run commercial print jobs. The options available when using such equipment also may be reduced. For example, only certain types of papers and stocks may be compatible or ink color palettes limited because use is reduced.
Even if equipment is developed to handle short-run orders and produce a high quality product, the order handling infrastructure becomes a limiting factor in the order time. Orders are often submitted to printing companies in hardcopy form. After the order is received by the printing company in the mail, as a facsimile document, or in some other form from an individual or dealer, the order must be manually entered and sometimes reentered into the printing system. A first entry may be needed for a printing company's billing system and a second separate entry for typesetting and actual printing. Multiple entries present multiple opportunities for typographical and other errors; the data enterer or typesetter may miss errors made by the consumer on the order form, may introduce new errors or inaccuracies when manually entering the order, and then may not catch these errors and inaccuracies when proofing the order they themselves entered.
In addition to being time-inefficient with respect to small-run orders, the existing commercial printing industry can also be information inefficient from both consumer and printer perspectives. To place a custom order according to some conventional practices, an individual consumer visits an office supply store, print shop, dealer, or other retailer to peruse available custom printing options available from a printing company. The retailer is typically a third party to the transaction between the consumer and the printing company, not formally affiliated with the printing company yet able to accept orders for the printing company's products in exchange for a commission or other fee. An individual may also submit an order directly to or through the printing company, such as through a catalog or other ordering system, without involving a third-party retailer. In one example relating to business cards, the consumer may be able to select card stock, colors, fonts, and graphics from one or more sample books provided by the retailer. The selections are generally made in isolation without providing the consumer with the opportunity to view the selections in combination. For example, other than holding cardstock and ink color sample charts near each other, the consumer may not be able to see what a selected ink color actually looks like when printed on a chosen cardstock. Further, certain printing or finishing effects offered may not be viewable in catalogs or may not always be provided in sample books.
After the aforementioned selections are made, the consumer will typically fill in desired custom content to be printed on the business card, such as name and contact information, on a hardcopy order form. The consumer's desired content must conform to the options provided by the hardcopy order form, with little or no opportunity for advanced custom layouts or other higher-level design features. The result is an order for a “custom” printed product that may not be fully customized as desired by the consumer because of information access constraints imposed by the hardcopy order submission process.
Further, the consumer may never have had an opportunity to view a complete mock-up or proof of their selections and therefore may not be entirely confident in the combined result of the various separate selections. Alternatively, if proofs are available, they may have to be mailed to the consumer for review, further delaying the overall order turnaround time and adding additional postage, delivery, and processing expenses. If electronic proofs can be provided, they still may not adequately display and convey colors. Therefore, existing order processes are information inefficient to consumers because consumers are provided with incomplete information during their design and decision-making process.
At times during the above process, the consumer might need or want assistance in making selections or clarifying options and may have specific questions relating to the mechanics of the ordering process. The only assistance available, however, may be the retailer's employees, who may be less familiar with the ordering process and multitude of options and who likely do not have specialized training in graphic layout and design. As mentioned above, the retailer is typically a third party to the transaction. Therefore, the retailer's employees may have limited training in and experience with the printing company's branding and product lines in order to offer related products that may be of use to the individual, depending on how long they have been with the retailer and how much training they received. Further, the retailer typically incurs the costs of and invests time in training each employee with respect to accepting and placing orders. These costs and times can become significant if multiple new employees are hired or if turnover occurs. Other retailers may have little motivation or interest in accepting or handling more complex orders. For example, a consumer ordering business cards may also need letterhead, envelopes, and announcement cards, or have use for business marketing products such as pens, folios, labels, and other items that include personalized printed content, so-called “up-selling” or cross-promotion. In the current custom printing order process, however, there is little or no opportunity for the printing company to directly offer these other products to the consumer. The consumer may also be interested in other products or services offered by the retailer, the printing company, or other organizations related to or somehow affiliated with either of these organizations. These other organizations, however, do not have a way of contacting the consumer to inform them of additional opportunities.
Further, as a simple matter of course, the printing company collects a significant amount of valuable information about the consumer placing the order, such as the consumer's contact information, job title, business or employer, order placement retailer, and location. With the exception of using the information to print and deliver the desired product, the information is not used to the benefit of any of the consumer, the retailer, or the printing company. Further, most retailers are not able to store the information, which may include logos, artwork, and specific print requirements, for future use. If a consumer decides to add items after an initial order is placed or desires to reorder later in the time, the entire order process may need to be repeated, including the gathering and transmission of basic information, in part or in its entirety. These information inefficiencies are experienced by both the consumer, who has limited access to available options, and the commercial printer, who may not be effectively meeting the needs of the consumer. These inefficiencies can also lead to product inconsistencies. For example, if a consumer wants to reorder business cards including a specialized logo a year after a first order and wants the reordered product to be identical to that of the first order, the consumer typically will have to resubmit the logo or other digital mark asset to the retailer or printing company because the original logo was not captured and stored for reuse either in hardcopy or digital form.
After the hardcopy order form is completed to the best of the consumer's ability, the retailer forwards the hardcopy form to the printing company, typically in the mail or by fax. Once received by the printing company, the order must be interpreted by a printing company employee and manually entered into the printing company's system as described above. If an order simply cannot be read or understood because of poor handwriting, incomplete data, or reduced document quality, the order is placed on hold and the hardcopy form is return mailed or faxed to the consumer placing the order or to the retailer where the order was placed. The consumer also can be contacted for clarification. Whether the form is returned or the consumer contacted, additional expense and inefficiency are introduced into the ordering process.
Inefficiencies are also introduced by existing order packaging and distribution systems. Commonly, after printing, the business cards are packaged into cardboard boxes and shipped or delivered. Current methods of packaging of business cards require that the business cards be packaged largely by hand, and that the lid to the business card box, as well as a sample card on the exterior of the box for identification of the contents, be applied manually. The process of actually printing business cards is largely accomplished by automation and can be done with high speed commercial grade printing machinery, albeit with the deficiencies described above. The requirement for manual packaging of the business cards at the end of the process dramatically limits the speed with which cards can be packaged and shipped. Further, when printing large run orders, each product is the same, making packaging and shipment a matter of matching the correct number of products to be sent to a particular recipient. In smaller run orders, particularly in batches of small runs held to form a single large run, order mix-ups can more easily occur, such as shipping the sixtieth order in a batch of one hundred to the address of the sixty-first order, particularly when orders are manually handled as described above. Order handling errors can also occur if a typographical error was introduced at the time of order placement or during the aforementioned manual order entry.
When the consumer ultimately receives their order, which may be one to several weeks after the order was initially placed, the consumer may notice errors or inaccuracies in the printed product. The error(s) may be significant enough to require reproduction of the entire order, or they may be minor enough that the consumer accepts the order as-is. In either event, the consumer may be reluctant to reorder from the same retailer (and, therefore, from the same printing company) in the future given the extended turnaround and disappointing result.
Conventional ordering and delivery systems for products including individualized, customized, or personalized information are therefore inefficient from both time and information perspectives and do not provide branding, marketing, and proofing opportunities in convenient ways. Therefore, a need remains in the industry for improved order placement and delivery systems for short-run individualized printed products.